Pro tip: If you’re going to attempt painting a California canyon with lasers, try to make sure you don’t scare the bejesus out of the area’s elderly.

Last April director Ben Tricklebank was testing out a concept for his collaboration with data visualization artist Aaron Koblin – a long-exposure photography project called Light Echoes – and in the process was projecting a series of rainbow-esque color bands on a canyon wall using an RGB laser. Koblin had purchased the laser on eBay for $600 and sent it to Tricklebank, who then mounted it to his car and was photographing the colors it spit out to see if it could leave very temporary graffiti on the landscape. He was in the middle of nowhere outside of his current hometown of Los Angeles and thought he was alone. He wasn’t.

“I scared the wits out of this poor old guy,” Tricklebank told WIRED. “It was really late at night on this canyon road and there’s nobody around then this car just came out of nowhere, slowed right down and stopped – then just drove really slowly right through the laser. It looked incredible, but the look on this guy’s face was like he was having a close encounter.”

The good news is that the guy didn’t call the cops, or (presumably) start crafting mountains out of mashed potatoes. The better news is that the experiment worked and Tricklebank and Koblin have turned that test run into a series of high-definition images and video showing what’s possible when smart coding and a bit of engineering turns a laser into a printer that can paint images onto the wild terrain.

Unlike Tricklebank’s experiment in the wilds of Southern California, the creation of the Light Echoes photos and video – premiering as part of Doug Aitken’s Station to Station traveling art circus (also online here) – weren’t created while strapped to the roof rack of an Audi A3. Instead the images were created using a laser mounted on a specially made crane that rolls slowly along train tracks projecting an image pixel by pixel. The images were then captured using a Red Epic high-definition camera. The project is just the kind of thing digital artists Koblin and Tricklebank would dream up, but its rolling-stock aesthetic was inspired directly by Aitken.

Aaron Koblin. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

“Doug reached out to me a while back and said, ‘I’m working on this train-based art extravaganza, what could you do in that context?'” Koblin told WIRED. “Basically, I thought the train itself, the physicality of the train was really interesting – the idea of space and time and how those play into perception.”

The concept, which Koblin and Tricklebank have been developing since early 2013, also has its roots in the work Koblin did with director James Frost for Radiohead’s “House of Cards” 3-D music video, which used data instead of cameras to create its images. That video, which was in turn inspired by work Koblin did at the University of California Los Angeles’ Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS), had no actual film/video. The images of a singing Thom Yorke weren’t created by filming him, but rather by scanning him with lidar (laser-light radar, basically) and then using the data from the lidar sensors to recreate his face in digital space using hundreds of points of light. If it sounds a little bit familiar, it is: Microsoft’s Kinect launched a wave of art and artists that made works based on the device’s infrared emissions and the cool patterns they created. (The visuals created by the Kinect’s weird infrared dot matrix even became an odd subplot in the movie Paranormal Activity 4.)

But what Koblin did for Light Echoes turns that idea on its head.

“What I set up [at UCLA] was basically an installation where you could pass through the laser, so instead of scanning the environment it would scan the changes over time,” Koblin said. “So what you got were images that were like [Marcel] Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. This project is a reversal of that: instead of using the lasers to scan environments, it’s about using a laser to put other environments on top of them.”

Of course bringing data, digital art, and America/Americana together is one of the things Koblin does best. The Bay Area-based artist’s Johnny Cash Project, which integrated crowdsourced illustrations of the folk hero into a single music video for “Ain’t No Grave,” was nominated for a Grammy. And Flight Patterns, the work for which he’s probably best known, is a stunning visualization of U.S. flight-tracking data (it also won a National Science Foundation award for best non-interactive multimedia). In his current role as head of Google’s Data Arts team, Koblin is perpetually curating internet visuals that use the internet of things (check out the best at Chrome Experiments). He is, in his way, taking the country’s data and turning it into art – and now he’s taking that art on the road.

While capturing laser designs overlaid on nature sounds difficult, Koblin and Tricklebank – who met while working together on Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” interactive film – seem to have handled it easily. After they conceived of the initial idea, Koblin snagged “the cheapest, junkiest RGB laser I could find” (the aforementioned eBay purchase) and worked up some code that would make it plot simple images while in motion. Then he sent it down to Tricklebank in LA for the canyon test, which worked out surprisingly well.

After that proof of concept, they rented a better laser (Koblin still has the eBay one, which he took to Burning Man and played Etch A Sketch with on the playa) and went about figuring out a way to make it work on train tracks. The first big challenge was mastering how to get it high enough to plot the images evenly. Working with the Fillmore and Western Railway Company in Ventura, which does a brisk business doing train setups for movie productions, they figured out the best way to go about it was to use a boom lift because it already had all the controls necessary to move the laser into position. Fillmore and Western had a boom lift, but it needed to be able to roll on the tracks. Luckily the company’s Andy Wilkinson had the idea to spot-weld steel train wheels onto a crane.

In the end, it didn’t require welding, just a strong set of chains to mount the boom lift to a train-track-ready utility cart. The rig was, according to Fillmore and Western owner Dave Wilkinson (Andy’s father), “unique – but we do what we’ve got to do.” And for the place that prides itself on being “home of the movie trains” and has worked on films as varied as Inception and The Lone Ranger, finding ways to make it work was just another day on the tracks. “We don’t get a lot of art projects,” Wilkinson told WIRED, “but it’s like today we’re filming NCIS and next week we’re doing an Advil commercial and the week after that we’re doing another commercial and then after that we have two shorts in between,” and each has their challenges, Light Echoes was no different.

One of the big benefits of using a laser to project the images instead of just throwing them down with a standard projector is that lasers plot each individual pixel, and so are infinitely focusable. And the one used for Light Echoes, built by a light-show company in Florida called LaserNet, had three red channels, a green, and a blue – each hand-calibrated with mirrors that could “print” 60,000 points of light per second onto the terrain. To make sure it laid out the images properly, Koblin wrote some “crazy hack code” in JavaScript and calibrated it to the speed of their crane rig. Turns out the self-powered beast idled at just about the perfect speed (somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 MPH).

All of the images shot for Light Echoes were recorded in one dusk-till-dawn run from July 24 to 25. Using Fillmore and Western’s tracks the pair set up their laser and “then drank coffee all night until the sun rose.” As the laser projected the images – topographic maps, composite shots, and Walt Whitman quotes – onto the landscape the Red Epic captured everything at speeds ranging from 4 frames per second to 97 FPS. Surprisingly, they got all the images they needed in a single night.

The pair also hopes the current crop of images and video (included here) are just the beginning. They’ve still got the rig, which is in partially disassembled storage with Fillmore and Western, and are looking to explore other laser photography applications. But first, they needed to pull together something cool for Aitken’s rolling art and music show.

For Station to Station the pair has put together a series of images to show as well as a short film Tricklebank made (premiering below). Koblin, who is joining the train journey today in Chicago, will be presenting the film as part of the project’s screening program and will also be contributing to Station‘s photo documentation as a guest photographer. Because of the complex rigging and the difficulties in projecting lasers from a moving object, they likely won’t be able to bring the Light Echoes set-up along on Aitken’s train, but Koblin hopes he can do something adjacent to his project during the traveling road show. “Doug is really interested in this open, who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen [thing],” he adds.

“We can’t emphasize enough how much of an adventure this was,” Koblin said. “We had hopes that this would work, but beyond that we had no idea what these images were going to look like.”